The present invention relates generally to information processing environments and, more particularly, to the task of generating a hard copy or "printout" in such environments.
With the advent of the personal computer, the use of computer systems is becoming increasingly prevalent in everyday life. Today, computers can be seen on the desktops of most business professionals. Running software applications such as word processors and spreadsheets, for example, even the average business professional can realize substantial productivity gains. Besides the business environment, computers can also be found in wide use both at home and at school.
In practically all computer applications, the user eventually needs a "printout" of some type. Such printouts or hard copies may take the form of paper printouts, slides, photos, and the like. Desktop users, in particular, prefer to print out information into one of a number of commercially-available formats, including address book formats (e.g., Daytimer), label formats (e.g., Avery), envelopes, and the like. Expectedly, one finds that present-day application software, particularly word processors and PIMs (Personal Information Managers), include the capability to output user data to pre-defined formats, such as those described above.
The present-day approach to the task of printing or outputting information within the constraints of a pre-defined format has distinct disadvantages, however. The problem may be viewed as follows. For any printing task or job, a system must contend with three issues: (1) the actual contents (i.e., the actual user data), (2) how the contents are to be laid out in the final printout, and (3) how individual items within the data contents are repeated. The third item concerns the repeating groups of items to be printed to a sheet of labels--how the individual groups are laid out.
In present day products the user is constrained in how he or she can lay out information in, for example, a label printout. Both WordPerfect.TM. for Windows and Ecco.TM. Pro are typical in this regard. Although each product provides the flexibility to include certain fields (i.e., define a repeating group) for a label printout, the user really has no free hand at specifying how the contents are laid out. In the instance of Ecco Pro, for example, pre-defined templates are provided which basically mandate the layout of the contents. The user is constrained to work within these format pre-defined by the vendor. Quite simply, the user does not have the flexibility to place information content in the layout anywhere he or she really wants.
Additionally, present day systems compromise the actual layout of the labels. For instance, certain commercial formats require data to be printed in a mirror fashion. Here, the page must be, in effect, "flipped over" to print the mirror image. Present-day systems, namely word processors and label-printing programs, do not support this functionality. Part of the problem of these programs is that they do not store (i.e., as their own native data) information about the content which is to be rendered on a label, address book, or the like. Instead, the user data is imported at final print time, for example, via a mail merge operation. This greatly restricts the ability of the user to adjust the layout of the contents since, beforehand, it is not known exactly what kind of data will be received upon import. Using a special envelope-printing function, for instance, the user might set out a very nice layout for an envelope, but at import/print time the actual data received might be too much or too little for the user's design.
What is needed is a system with interface and methods which give users the flexibility to choose how contents are laid out, despite the fact that the actual contents might not be known beforehand. More particularly, such a system should provide the user with the ability to position content in a free-form manner, yet have that data printed out in the appropriate manner for the target commercial form.